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Sunday, October 21, 2012

"Visiting Vimy" an award-winning essay by Brenda Ross

The phone rang, a
wake-up call to my hotel room that morning, and I almost changed my mind.I could barely move to answer the phone, let
alone get out of bed.Jet lag left me in
an earlier time zone, my entire being exhausted.Perhaps I would sleep late and stay. After
all, Paris is for tourists.

Then it called to me. Closer than ever before, “You’re almost here,”
it called… and I found the energy to get up.

A few hours and a train
ride later, the sun was shining and the sky clear blue as the taxi turned off a
two lane road onto a secluded laneway.
Had I been driving, I am sure I would have missed it altogether. Up the gentle incline of the tree-lined laneway
the taxi drove, popping in and out of dappled sunlight. It came to a sudden
halt in front of a locked gate. Could it
be closed? My gracious driver brought relief when he pointed to his watch then
a posted sign indicating in French the park did not open until ten o’clock and
it was only a little after nine.

With trepidation, I
handed him payment and stepped from the cab. What was I doing here, by myself,
in the middle of nowhere? A return train
ticket to Paris in my pocket held no reassurance. I had no clue how to get back to the train
station. All I knew was that I had
reached Vimy Ridge. All other challenges
paled in comparison.

My friendly driver drove
off, the sound of his tires fading to silence.
It was a beautiful spring Saturday morning, the grass around me lush and
green. Trees, proudly displaying their bright
new foliage, gently waved greetings in the slight breeze. The signs around me looked strangely familiar:
brown with bilingual yellow print, English and French, yet I could not quite
place where I had seen them before.

Not knowing my bearings,
I wandered along a gravel path a short distance to see huge, gaping holes in
the ground. The diameter of each hole ranged
from twelve to fifteen meters across. The inner slopes, blanketed in the same
velvety grass, steeply dropped to a similar depth. These holes resembled
craters. Narrow trenches carved deep into the earth, upheld with cemented
sandbags, snaked between the craters. The
trenches were marked, helping me to clearly understand where I stood and what I
was looking at: ‘The German Front’.

Turning from this place,
I started back toward the gate that had abruptly stopped my earlier progress. The peaceful pathway was newly paved asphalt,
mostly under the protection of maples. The
ground under the trees, rich and lush, rolled in unusual depressions about
every two or three meters. The maples wept
raindrops, telling tale of a recent storm despite the clear skies of today. Fence
posts connected by hanging cable lined the full length of long pathway. A sign up ahead declared: ‘Danger: No entry.
Undetonated explosives’.

As the path rounded a
curve, I had my first glimpse of the Canadian Monument through the few
remaining trees. The monument was
exactly that: monumental, made of pale limestone, towering high into the sky, a
startlingly white pair of tall, narrow pylons emerged from a sturdy platform
base. The base was half a football field
in size. Much like uniform columns, the twin pylons scraped the sky at thirty
meters height. Surrounding the monument was a treeless, level, grassy park,
groomed by a close cut, without the unusual dips and peaks.

A few low tree limbs brushed
me with an embrace before I reached a wide, white stone double walkway. It was
perfectly straight, leading directly through the open park to the monument. A large sign, brown and yellow, at the
junction of the paths finally triggered my memory. Vimy Ridge is a Canadian National park. My visits to Banff and Algonquin National
Parks suddenly came back to me. How
remarkable that here I stood, thousands of kilometers and across the Atlantic
ocean from my home country, a guest in a foreign land, yet on Canadian
soil. Another sign explained that the
French government had gifted this 250 acre area in perpetuity to Canada out of
gratitude following the Great War.

Although the park
buildings had not opened, the monument was accessible to pedestrians. A young
woman stood sideways to me, alone between the pillars of the still distant platform,
wearing a pale dress and bright red sweater, unbuttoned and hugged close with
her arms crossed tightly in front. Her loosely
worn hair blew in the breeze. She turned
away from the monument, eyes down, and stepped swiftly on light feet down the
steps towards me along the white path.

It was difficult to be
indifferent to this place. More signs,
these ones concise and direct: ‘Silence and Respect’, they demanded. Walking this path towards the monument, I
felt a change. The monument was at the
edge of a ridge. Hanging over the plain
of Lens-Douai, a stormy sky was the monument’s dark gray backdrop. Ahead and far below, where the ridge
plummeted into the wild growth, two joggers ran soundlessly in unison on the
circular road that bordered the outer limits of the park around the monument.

I looked back to the
monument just as the young woman reached me.
Her eyes remained downcast and her quick steps told me she would not
stop to speak. One hand was at her mouth
and tears streamed down her cheeks. In
the quiet of this solemn place I heard her sob softly as she passed me by, like
a reflection.

The sun shone brightly
on the monument from the sky above, despite the stormy sky over the plain,
illuminating beautiful, larger-than-life figures carved into the peaks of the
pylons. No one was at the monument now,
and it soared over me as I approached. The base, above the height of my head, had
markings that started to materialize.
Thousands of names, some with rank, were inscribed upon the outer walls
of the base.

Before climbing the
steps to the platform, I slowly surveyed the chiseled names. Stark and plain, I reached out and touched
them. Cold, smooth. There was no life in that rock. It was not the warm pink granite of our great
Canadian Shield. My surname was carved close by, several times, along with many
other names. So many names. I did not
come to Vimy to seek a lost family member but found myself wondering: were
these men distant relatives, unknown to my life because theirs had ended here?

I turned back and climbed
the steps to the platform between the towering twin pylons. Looking high to their peaks, the sun warmed
my face and dazzled my eyes as I squeezed them shut. At that moment, eyes shut, I heard a distinct
sound pierce the silence. High-pitched
and faint, the only sound… a living thing… peaceful… a bird. “And in the sky the larks, still bravely
singing, fly…”

With my eyes shut in silence
I heard the din. Guns and artillery exploded,
the sounds of carnage and destruction.
Not a blade of grass was visible in my mind. Not a leaf on a tree or an unbroken trunk,
leaning, roots grasping, withstood the desolation. No white stone platform protected me from the
mud, blood and death at my feet. The
sky, thick with smoke and heavy overhead cloud, caused a bone-chilling
dampness. As real as the tears that
welled in my eyes, I heard and felt this. Fear and sorrow gripped my soul.

When I opened my eyes
again, the grass was groomed and green, the leaves of the trees still fluttered
in the breeze, the sun shone down from the sky above, and the joggers ran a
second lap round Vimy Ridge. Time moved
on and the park buildings opened.

The balance of the day
was spent in a wonderful explore of the history of Vimy Ridge during the Great
War. The Interpretive Centre, loaded
with artifacts and displays, tells the story of how Canada came together as a
nation. I was treated like royalty by
the two young men working there, dressed in familiar tan shirts and brown
pants, Canada’s National Parks uniform.
As I entered I greeted them tentatively, “Bonjour …”

“Canadian! Welcome
home,” was the warm response. I had stepped into Canada.

A walking tour of the
tunnels and trenches showed the conditions under which our men in arms, branded
British but proudly Canadian, so valiantly fought the enemy upon that
ridge. The enormous craters at the Front
were formed on the same day that Canadians won the ridge. Those craters still remain.

In the tunnels, towards
the end of the tour, the guide said, “These tour tunnels were widened, ceilings
raised and modern lights installed.” He indicated to a dull passageway. “This tunnel,
off limits for your safety, is preserved with the low ceilings, narrow walls
and dull lighting of 1917.”

As the tour moved on, I hung
back, pressing against the barrier to peer down the banned passageway. In the tense,
oppressed atmosphere, dozens of men in uniform leaned and sat against the
walls, waiting to be called from the tunnel to attack in no man’s land. Some sipped
lukewarm tea made with brackish water. Two spoke softly, so as not to be
detected by the enemy. Another, his helmet momentarily set aside, squinted in
the dimness at a photograph of his sweetheart. I blinked and they were gone.

Back above, at the park
cemetery, tears flowed freely again. Row upon row of gravestones marked the
last resting place of so many young Canadian men, boys really, who came to
France as I came, but never returned to their loved ones and the country they
called home.

I walked a last time
along the treed path towards the monument, this time understanding each
depression in the ground to be the place where an artillery shell had exploded ninety
five years ago. Thousands upon thousands
of them. The trees, leaning to me in the wind, are men: the Canadian soldiers
with no known graves, their mortal remains in the Canadian soil of France and
pulsing through the veins of the trees, rooted firmly, their maple leaves
whispering, “…take me home with you.”
The trees number the same as the names on the monument base:
11,285. Upon my last visit to the
monument, I no longer had it to myself but shared it with many pilgrims, come
to pay homage. The pristine chiseled rock basked all day in the sun’s rays but
remained icy cold. It is a deception, this park. So much violence and chaos concealed under a
lush layer of growth and brilliant white human engineering.

This place had called to
me. Over an ocean and half a continent
it had called. It called and I came. To
the craters, the tunnels, the trenches.
To the monument, the signs and the trees. But most of all, I came to the place where
Canadian nationalism found itself through young men, far from home, bound by a
commonality only described as being Canadian.
Men who gave their lives so that we may live in peace. It called and I came, not just to observe,
but to find myself also. Many times in
my life I have been deeply moved, but nothing has moved me more deeply than my
day at Vimy Ridge.

Brenda Ross lives in Brampton but
prefers to be sailing in her favourite place, the North Channel of Manitoulin
Island. She has been published in the magazine Latitudes and Attitudes and in the newspaper The Muskokan. Brenda is currently working on a novel. “Visiting Vimy”
won the 2012 winner of the Muskoka Chautauqua writing contest.

Brian Henry has been a book editor, writer, and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He teaches creative writing at Ryerson University. He also leads weekly creative writing courses in Burlington, Mississauga, Oakville and Georgetown and conducts Saturday workshops throughout Ontario. His proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get published.